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I built 3 MVPs that never shipped. Here's what I learned.

#javascript #nextjs #indiehacker #buildinpublic

I want to tell you about three projects I spent hundreds of hours on that nobody ever used. Not because I ran out of time. Because I never shipped them.

The three projects

Project 1: Freelancer time tracker
Core timer working within two weeks. Then: reporting dashboard, CSV export, team features, client portal — for a product with zero users. Archived when I changed jobs.

Project 2: Notion template marketplace
60% done before the backend rewrites started. "The architecture wasn't clean enough." Month four: clean code, no product, no energy.

Project 3: AI habit tracker
Built it, used it myself for two weeks, stopped when I couldn't answer "why would anyone pay for this?"

Three codebases on GitHub. Zero shipped products.

The pattern I kept missing

I was optimizing for building, not for shipping.

Without a hard external forcing function, the project always slipped. Re-entry friction accumulated. Every session started with: what do I work on today? If that question took 20 minutes to answer — or worse, if I answered it wrong and spent 3 hours on something that didn't move the needle — I'd slowly start avoiding the project altogether.

Eventually it entered "almost done permanently." Touching it meant confronting how much was left. So I just didn't.

How I fixed it — the technical side

I built MVP Builder: a structured 30-day sprint with one focused daily prompt, delivered 07:00–09:00 local time.

The constraint: Vercel free tier allows max 2 cron jobs, minimum daily interval.

My solution — two cron jobs covering both hemispheres:

0 6 * * *   → EU: CET 07:00, CEST 08:00
0 14 * * *  → Americas: MST 07:00, CST 08:00, EST 09:00
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Timezone filtering (app-side, not cron-side) 

import { toZonedTime } from 'date-fns-tz';

function isInDeliveryWindow(timezone) {
  try {
    const zoned = toZonedTime(new Date(), timezone);
    const hour = zoned.getHours();
    return hour >= 7 && hour < 9;
  } catch {
    return true; // fail-open: send rather than skip
  }
}
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Why app-side filtering instead of more cron jobs? Because cron runs at a fixed UTC time — it can't know each user's local hour. The filter runs per-user at send time.

Why fail-open? An invalid timezone (typo, legacy string) shouldn't mean the user never gets their prompt. Missing one day is worse than getting it slightly off-window.

Idempotency: 20h lookback, not 24h 

const twentyHoursAgo = new Date(Date.now() - 20 * 60 * 60 * 1000);

const { data: alreadySent } = await supabase
  .from('users')
  .select('id')
  .eq('id', userId)
  .gt('last_prompt_sent_at', twentyHoursAgo.toISOString())
  .single();

if (alreadySent) return; // already sent today
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Why 20h and not 24h? DST transitions. A 24h lookback on a DST-switch day can either skip a user or double-send. 20h is safely within any DST shift (max ±1h) while still preventing duplicates within the same day.

Timezone capture at signup (silent, no UI change) 

const detected = Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone;
// → include in form payload, no UI element needed
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One line. No dropdown. No user decision fatigue. Works on every modern browser.

The schema (relevant columns) 

ALTER TABLE users ADD COLUMN timezone TEXT DEFAULT 'Europe/Berlin';
ALTER TABLE users ADD COLUMN last_prompt_sent_at TIMESTAMPTZ;
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The DEFAULT 'Europe/Berlin' matters: new users without a detected timezone still get a prompt at a reasonable hour rather than silently skipping.

What's different this time

I shipped it.

$0 MRR. Beta cohort is free. The product that helps developers ship has to ship first — otherwise the whole premise falls apart.

Three tiers based on where you actually are:

  • Bronze (13 days): Idea → working prototype
  • Silver (21 days): Started but stuck → shippable product
  • Gold (30 days): Almost done → actually shipped

Each morning: one focused prompt, 30–90 minutes max. No sprawling to-do lists. One milestone checkpoint with proof of work. That's it.

Cohort #1 is free. 5–8 spots: mvpbuilder.io/pipeline

If you've shipped something after a long struggle — or if you're currently stuck at "almost done" — drop it in the comments. I read every one.

Building in public. Will post updates on what the beta cohort looks like.

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